75th Anniversary Issue
As she lay dying, the widow of a Milwaukee newspaper editor made a gift that has now invigorated journalism for 75 years. Agnes Wahl Nieman, a well-educated woman with a fondness for bicycling, willed money to Harvard to “promote and elevate the standards of journalism.” That $1.4 million bequest (worth about $23 million in today’s dollars) funded the Nieman Fellowship program that has brought 1,442 journalists from around the world to Harvard for a year of study. To celebrate the Nieman Foundation for Journalism’s 75th anniversary, Nieman Reports tells the stories of 75 Nieman Fellows, among them pioneers in biography, documentary filmmaking, and investigative journalism.
King (1929–2012) had a wide range, from “Confessions of a White Racist,” nominated for a National Book Award, to the Playboy article that inspired “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas”
I have pretty much revised my thinking on how I will use my year—not digging in pursuit of refinement of my knowledge about the American Past in general, but concentrating in the main on the novel. I am taking several approaches to this, having found three good courses ... on writing and all taking different approaches. One course is a creative writing offering on the novel and the short-story, taught by an aged New England gentleman of excellent reputation, Theodore Morrison, whose main claim to fame in a public sense is that he taught an ex-Nieman named A.B. Guthrie (“The Big Sky,” as you will recall, and others) how to write fiction. Morrison is teaching me something, too: Sometimes I find that I knew, or in some corner of my soul suspected, some of his favorite maxims; it helps, however, to hear them articulated; other of his ideas are entirely new and helpful. He is, in short, putting the abstract “rules” of the novel into words I can grab with my brain, organizing my thinking a bit.
From “Larry L. King: A Writer’s Life in Letters, or, Reflections in a Bloodshot Eye,” edited by Richard A. Holland
I have pretty much revised my thinking on how I will use my year—not digging in pursuit of refinement of my knowledge about the American Past in general, but concentrating in the main on the novel. I am taking several approaches to this, having found three good courses ... on writing and all taking different approaches. One course is a creative writing offering on the novel and the short-story, taught by an aged New England gentleman of excellent reputation, Theodore Morrison, whose main claim to fame in a public sense is that he taught an ex-Nieman named A.B. Guthrie (“The Big Sky,” as you will recall, and others) how to write fiction. Morrison is teaching me something, too: Sometimes I find that I knew, or in some corner of my soul suspected, some of his favorite maxims; it helps, however, to hear them articulated; other of his ideas are entirely new and helpful. He is, in short, putting the abstract “rules” of the novel into words I can grab with my brain, organizing my thinking a bit.From “Larry L. King: A Writer’s Life in Letters, or, Reflections in a Bloodshot Eye,” edited by Richard A. Holland
